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Ramping Up Attacks on California's Planners

April 23, 2012, 12pm PDT

The Wall Street Journal's obsession with planning in California continued this past weekend, as they asked Joel Kotkin, demographer and "Truman Democrat", to discuss what he believes is driving "the great California exodus".

Adding to the recent back and forth, instigated by Wendell Cox, over California's efforts to contain sprawl and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state, the Journal's Allysia Finley asks Joel Kotkin to weigh in.

Making clear the paper's editorial position on the state, Finley, the assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com and a Journal editorial page writer, frames her discussion with Kotkin as such:

"Now, however, the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere."

The incendiary remarks don't stop there:

"And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their 'smart growth' plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. 'What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,' Mr. Kotkin declares."

"'The new regime'-his [Kotkin's] name for progressive apparatchiks who run California's government-'wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles.'"